From: Keith Moore <moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu>
...
Other than latency, message size, message rate, and the number of
participants, what is the difference between an AOL chat room and this
mailing list as exemplified by this thread?
why, the participants, of course.
once people move into chat rooms and make acquaintances there, they
become reluctant to leave. if changing service providers means they
must leave, they're less likely to change service providers even
though they get lousy service.
It sounded as if you were making the standard swipe at people who use
AOL. If you had been, my rejoinder would have been to quote the first
vacation message I got in response to my note.
However, I've suddenly realized that the fault for some of the vacation
messages rests with the people running this list. Notice that they
are not including a "Precedence: bulk" or "Precedence: bulk" lines
which tell at least some `vacation` programs to do the obvious. They
do include "X-Loop: ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org"
In other words, the IETF itself is not above some standads bending..
...
still, my point was that the AOL community is more-or-less disjoint
from the community of folks who read IETF documents, and is likely
to remain so. that's not necessarily a bad thing overall, but it
does imply that IETF will have little effect on the decision-making
habits of AOL subscribers.
yes.
if AOL subscribers cared about standards
compliance they would have left AOL long ago.
You're wrong about that. Remember when AOL didn't have anything to do
with the Internet? That the standards for some of the services that AOL
sells are written and published by AOL instead of the IETF, ITU, ANSI, or
IEEE doesn't make them any less interesting to those buying those services.
In other words, if the IETF were to suddenly and not upwardly compatibly
change the spelling of "Rctp To" in "To Rcpt" in SMTP and if AOL were to
make a similar change in their services, which change would generate more
enraged phone calls?
Note that I think AOL ought to be sued for false advertising because
of the SMTP redirection proxies it interposes in the services that it
does claim have something to do with the Internet.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com